After reading Charles J. Maland’s essay on 1951 Hollywood and the House Un-American Activities Committee (H.U.A.C.), comment on any aspect of the essay that interests you in a discussion post of at least 400 words.
Write a standard college essay with your name, the essay title, introductory and conclusion paragraphs, free from grammatical errors, double-spaced, normal font (Times New Roman 12-point font).

Hollywood & H.U.A.C.
A photo of a woman with short hair sitting at desk. She’s wearing a light blue outfit and has a pencil in one hand and a book in the other. Towards the bottom of the image there are a couple of people’s faces.On October 29th, 1947, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column “My Day” her opinion that while the film industry was “a great industry with infinite possibilities for good and bad” its “primary purpose is to entertain people”:
“In the long run . . . [it is the movie-goer] who decides whether what [the movie industry] does is good or bad . . . . In a democratic country I do not think the public will tolerate . . . [the government’s] removal of its right to decide what it thinks of . . . ideas and performances . . . [created by the movie studios].”
What prompted Mrs. Roosevelt’s commentary was the recent decision by members of a U.S. House of Representatives committee called the “House Un-American Activities Committee” (1938-1975 and commonly known as H.U.A.C.), to investigate Hollywood’s film industry in order to “hunt out” communist sympathizers or other “subversives” who may be creating propagandistic films meant to brainwash the American people into denouncing democracy and embracing communism.
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Read Eleanor Roosevelt’s October 29, 1947 column on H.U.A.C. in My Day.
H.U.A.C. Continued
A black and white photo of a group of men huddled together. Two are sitting down and writing on a piece of paper. Three men are looking over their shouldersH.U.A.C. had its origins in earlier twentieth-century House committees and subcommittees created to investigate, at first, pro-German sentiments in the United States and then Bolshevik sympathizers during and post-World War I. With the advent of World War II, H.U.A.C. precursor-committees looked for pro-Hitler or pro-Japanese activity in the United States. It was this committee that recommended internment camps for one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese immigrants (issei) and Japanese-Americans (second-generation or nisei and third-generation or sansei) who lived on the West Coast following President Roosevelt’s creation of a “zone of exclusion” in 1942 over fears that the Japanese were planning to attack California, Oregon, Washington, or Arizona as a follow-up to their attack on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor naval base in December of 1941 (depicted in From Here to Eternity1953).
Post-World-War II, H.U.A.C. focused increasingly on seeking out “communist subversives” among U.S civilians, or within governmental or public organizations. Although the House formed this committee for the purpose of strengthening U.S. democracy, H.U.A.C.’s questioning of suspected or known communist sympathizers had the ironic effect of undermining democratic principles of freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly. Using tactics of defamation, fear-mongering, and judicial intimidation, H.U.A.C. destroyed many lives in its hunt for internal enemies of the state.
A black and white photo of a group of people holding picket signsAt first H.U.A.C. concentrated on bringing organizational leaders, government employees (including Alger Hiss) or private citizens before the committee to testify about their own activities or to “name names” regarding people they knew to be sympathetic to the principles of communism, but in September of 1947 the nine-member committee turned to Hollywood, subpoenaing close to eighty directors, actors, and screenwriters, most of whom refused to appear before H.U.A.C. The first ten of these eighty who finally agreed to do so were afterwards known as the “Hollywood Ten,” and they used their appearance before the committee to assert their First Amendment rights to privacy, intellectual freedom, and rights to freedom of speech. H.U.A.C. considered this first group of Hollywood workers to be in contempt of their committee and fined them each the 2016 equivalent of eleven-thousand dollars and, further, sentenced them to prison for anywhere from one to three years.
For the next decade, Hollywood was gripped with a fear of displeasing the H.U.A.C. members and barred anyone from Hollywood’s studios who had even been, was currently, or was even rumored to have been a communist or a communist sympathizer. This state of ostracization was known as being black- or gray-listed. H.U.A.C. eventually questioned thousands of Hollywood workers, and over three hundred directors, screenwriters, actors, musicians, and film technicians were black or gray-listed, thereby effectively ruining many of their West Coast careers.
Text that is telling Americans to not patronize ‘Reds’Some of the entertainers and creators thus affected included Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, Richard Attenborough, Edward Dmytryk, Carl Foreman, Jules Dassin, Arthur Miller, Richard Wright, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Ring Lardner, Jr., Dorothy Parker, Edward G. Robinson, Eddie Albert, Uta Hagen, John Garfield, Ruth Gordon, Lee Grant, José Ferrer, Barbara Bel Geddes, Lee J. Cobb, Stella Adler, Burgess Meredith, Dolores del Rio, Zero Mostel, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Pete Seeger, Artie Shaw, Burl Ives, and Gypsy Rose Lee. By the 1960s, the Civil Rights and anti-war movements helped to lessen H.U.A.C.’s power. Although the committee was dissolved in 1975, as recently as 2016 former U.S. congressman Newt Gingrich called for its reformation in order to combat Islamic terrorist threats to the United States.
The Prowler’s screenwriter – Dalton Trumbo – was one of the original “Hollywood Ten.” Trumbo paid the fine, and in 1950 he served almost a year in federal prison under his “contempt of Congress” charge. Although he was blacklisted, Trumbo continued to write screenplays after his H.U.A.C. experience, but always under a pseudonym or under another, non-blacklisted, writer’s name. Joseph Losey was also called before H.U.A.C., but he chose a route different from Trumbo’s in that he refused to appear at all and fled the United States for Great Britain where he remained living and working mostly in London (the London-based British Film Institute now possesses the Losey archive including the working script for The Prowler).
The Hollywood Hills and the American West
Kubrick’s early noir heist film The Killing could take place in any American city large enough to contain a racetrack and an airport – he makes little use of Los Angeles’ topography or architecture, and no one occupation is tied to Los Angeles specifically – or even tied to the west coast for that matter. When we view The Killing, we could be watching a film set in Chicago, Cincinnati, or Miami as easily as one set in Hollywood which is where the film’s story unfolds. In contrast to The Killing’s use of place, The Prowler’s plot and cinematic sensibilities hinge on numerous elements utterly specific to Los Angeles and its environs. Susan, a would-be starlet who migrated to the decadent West Coast from the wholesome Midwest, married a much older, wealthy radio personality because her dreams of stardom failed. Van Heflin’s patrol-officer character (“Webb Garwood”) was a Midwestern hometown hero who came west to chase his dreams of wealth and social status only to find himself a lowly beat cop filled with envy of those who have struck it rich.
Like Norma Desmond’s and Phyllis Dietrichson’s Spanish Revival manses, the Gilvray house in The Prowler is an eerie, lonely prison. As does Wilder in Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, Hawks in The Big Sleep, or Richardson in The Loved One, Lousey depicts the Hollywood Hills as a sparsely populated locale whose low housing density, narrow winding streets, deep canyons and lush vegetation make it an ideal setting for idiopathic lives and secretive crimes.
By the 1930s, Beverly Hills had tamed its urban wilderness characteristics and was filled with splendid well-manicured mansions, but other Hollywood hillside and canyon communities emphasized their furtive, marginal, or eccentric positions. While this was particularly true of Laurel Canyon with its origins as a banditti hideout and later an artists’ colony, similar outré images were also associated, for example, with Coldwater, Benedict, Runyon, Beechwood, Outpost, Nichols, and Franklin canyons—all canyons of Los Angeles’ ancient Santa Monica mountain range.
The Hills can also serve as a place of natural beauty. In The Day of the Locust, the narrator describes a Hollywood Hills hike undertaken by Tod Hackett, Faye Greener, and Faye’s cowboy-extra boyfriend Earle to Earle’s and his friend Mig’s rough Hollywood Hills camp:
It was full spring. The path ran along the bottom of a narrow canyon and wherever weeds could get a purchase in its steep banks they flowered in purple, blue and yellow. Orange poppies bordered the path. Their petals were wrinkled like crepe and their leavers were heavy with talcumlike dust.
They climbed until they reached another canyon. This one was sterile, but its bare ground and jagged rocks were even more brilliantly colored than the flowers of the first. The path was silver, grained with streaks of rose-gray, and the walls of the canyon were turquoise, mauve, chocolate and lavender. The air itself was vibrant pink.
They stopped to watch a hummingbird chase a blue jay. The jay flashed by squawking with its tiny enemy on its tail like a ruby bullet. The gaudy birds burst the colored air into a thousand glittering particles like metal confetti.
When they came out of this canyon, they saw below them a little green valley thick with trees, mostly eucalyptus, with here and there a poplar and one enormous black live-oak. Sliding and stumbling down a dry wash, they made for the valley.
Los Angeles is at once flat, hilly, and mountainous. The Santa Monica Mountains run from the Pacific Ocean through Malibu, Santa Monica, Brentwood, Beverly Hills and Hollywood like a fist set down in Malibu and Santa Monica with one delicate finger extended through the Beverly Hills and Hollywood neighborhoods.
An image of a building on a hill overlooking a city

This eroded mountain range — crumbly and hilly with age — terminates in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, host to the Los Angeles zoo and the Griffith Park observatory featured in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955). At four thousand acres, it is the largest urban park in the world. Near to Griffith Park and also in these mountains are the Hollywood Bowl outdoor concert shell (Neff takes Lola there in Double Indemnity) and the iconic “Hollywoodland” sign.
A black and white photo of the Hollywood signWest of the Santa Monica Mountains lie the flatlands of Hollywood and Los Angeles including Los Angeles International Airport, Westchester, Inglewood, Chinatown, Venice Beach, and downtown L.A. To the range’s east is the San Fernando Valley, ringed in its turn on the north by the Santa Susana and San Gabriel mountains. As we have seen, Walsh filmed White Heat’s train robbery in the Santa Susana Mountains (near Chatsworth) where the Santa Susanas were meant to represent the Sierras.
Located near Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, the San Gabriel Mountains stand sentry between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert. The Angeles Crest Highway (State Road 2) begins near Pasadena in La Cañada and heads east over the San Gabriels to the mountain village of Wrightwood. From there one could in the 1940s head south and pick up Route 66 (now supplanted by Interstate 15) to continue on to the desert towns of Victorville and Barstow. This desert highway crosses the Mojave Desert and leads eventually into Las Vegas, Nevada.
As we learn in The Prowler, Webb Garwood’s dream is to leave Hollywood and become the proprietor of a roadside motel. Were we to name an exact location of Garwood’s motel, a good guess would be Wrightwood situated at the terminus of the “Angeles Crest” highway, as even today it is filled with examples of “housekeeping cabins” popular with mid-twentieth-century motoring tourists. Perched on the eastern slope of the San Gabriel Mountains, Wrightwood and the Garwoods (if this is indeed the locale of their motel) have their backs turned to Los Angeles and are facing east towards the most brutal desert of the American west.
A photo of an orange sign that says Motel and blue sign that says Pool
During the 1940s and 1950s, American film studios produced many film genres aside from film noir including musicals (Meet Me in St. Louis1944), costume dramas (Helen of Troy 1956), war films (They Were Expendable 1945; From Here to Eternity 1953), dramas and melodramas (Peyton Place 1957), horror movies (The Cat People 1942), science fiction (The Thing from Another World 1951), action films (The Mark of Zorro1940), comedies (My Little Chickadee 1940), and adventure movies (Mogambo 1953). Perhaps the most popular and iconically “American” of these genres was the Western, a genre most powerful realized by the great American film-maker John Ford (The Searchers 1956, My Darling Clementine (1946), Stagecoach 1939, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 1962). Most of our directors for this course worked in several of these genres along with their noir offerings. Hawks was known also for his comedy, science fiction, war, and Westerns; Wilder for drama and most especially comedy as we have seen. Walsh was known especially for his Westerns, but he also directed costume, comedy, and adventure films, while Farrow worked mostly in noir and war or adventure genres. Tourneur, like Hawks and Walsh, filmed a wide-range of genres including horror, drama, Westerns, and adventure films.
A black and white photo of a man in a suit sitting in a chairThe Prowler’s director Losey worked mostly in noir and drama, with some forays into war, costume drama, and science fiction films. Like Farrow, he showed very little interest in the Western over his career’s course, and yet the second half of The Prowler shifts from a classic L.A. noir setting into a deserted mining town – the actual desert ghost town of Calico located only thirteen miles northeast of Barstow (not to be confused with the non-ghost town of Calico, California near Bakersfield and one hundred and fifty miles north of Barstow). Here Lousey captures the dreary bleakness but also the terrible beauty of the California desert seen in countless Westerns but also in such noirs such as Ida Lupino’s 1953 The Hitchhiker, Dick Powell’s Split Second (1953) and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). All of these desert noirs are descendants of Eric von Stroheim’s 1924 silent masterpiece Greed where he spent two months filming the movie’s brutal finale in California’s Death Valley. In her study of film noirs that move “beyond the city,” Imogen Sara Smith reads desert locales in films noir as spaces of “spiritual emptiness and infertility” where “all the illusory protections of civilization are stripped away.”

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